What Happened to Mainelli's After Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network)?

Restaurant: Impossible (Food Network) traveled to Mainelli's, a neighborhood Italian restaurant on Chalkstone Avenue in the Mount Pleasant section of Providence, Rhode Island, for the second episode of the series, which aired January 26, 2011. As shown in the episode, Robert Irvine found dirty tables, slow service, and kitchen staff who had not been trained in basic food-safety practices. A large red "closed" sign had also been left on the front door even though the restaurant was open, which Irvine identified as actively discouraging walk-in customers and undercutting an already struggling neighborhood business.

Over the show's typical two-day turnaround, Irvine's team retrained the kitchen staff, reworked the menu, and refreshed the dining room, then used local media outreach to tell the neighborhood that Mainelli's was in fact open for business. A local restaurant critic quoted in a 2026 Tasting Table retrospective disputed how the show portrayed the restaurant's problems and pricing, calling the on-air depiction exaggerated relative to what the critic had observed firsthand. Business improved for a period after the episode aired, according to the same Tasting Table piece, which also reported that a car crashed into the building shortly after filming and that the family lacked the funds to recover from the resulting damage.

A public auction notice posted by SIA International Auctioneers advertised the sale of the Mainelli's restaurant property, including its two dining areas, full bar, and a five-room second-floor apartment, for October 9, 2013. Mainelli's no longer appears as an open business: Yelp's current listing for "Mainelli's Restaurant" at 1366 Chalkstone Avenue is marked permanently closed. A separate online description identified a Peruvian restaurant, Machupicchu Restaurant II, as later occupying the same address, though no dated, named source confirms that detail.